This Program has Performed an Illegal Operation
by starheart20
Summary: Hermione reflects on being a muggle born witch


This Program has performed an Illegal Operation  
  
A Harry Potter Fanfiction by Star-Heart  
  
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Sometimes it is hard to know what it means when you get an error message on the computer. It always means that you've done something wrong or that you are about to, what isn't always clear.  
  
To be truthful I never get what it is I've done wrong but follow the instructions anyways. That's something that you can never tell anybody at my school. I always feel a humongous pressure to work hard and be the best student I can possibly be, top of the year if at all possible. It's because some of the students look down on me you see, because I'm different, the first person in my family to ever show magical powers, the first to attend Hogwarts.  
  
You'd think that being Muggle Born I would understand what the error messages I keep getting here on my screen mean. It's ironic, isn't it? The "mudblood" is top of her class at Hogwarts despite her parentage or upbringing yet struggles to work a simply programme that a lot of children ten years younger then her would find easy and be able to complete this - the task I've sat here and struggled to complete for an hour - in mere minutes.  
  
This is my deepest secret, my inability to use a computer. This might sound like a weird thing to have as your greatest fear, particularly when you are hiding the fact that you are a witch from the majority of your friends and family, but there you have it.  
  
The fact that there is something that can stump me, Hermione Granger, would provide my friends, particularly the Weasley Twins with an opportunity for endless teasing and more then likely provide Malfoy with another opportunity to talk down about me - "The mudblood can't even work a muggle device" I can just hear him now. And then there's what would happen if my muggle friends found out. They all think that I go to an exclusive boarding school in Scotland for gifted students, if they found out that I can't even use a computer to send a quick e-mail that would be that, my cover would be blown and some other plan put into place to hide the truth, to hide the fact that I am a witch.  
  
I love being a witch, it is an innate part of me and it feels so natural. As soon as I got my letter telling me I didn't feel any disbelief or shock at the thought, I didn't scoff and say that "there's no such thing as magic", I simply knew that it was the truth, that there was an explanation for all of the weird things that happened to me and that it was normal. But sometimes I must admit that I look back at the days when I was "just" a muggle with a pang of regret and wish that I could have those days back again.  
  
As you can probably tell, I now live something of a double life. My friends at Hogwarts are the only people who know the truth about my life. My parents know that I am a witch, they know that I attend Hogwarts where people dress in robes and the post is delivered by owl. The rest of my family and my old friends from my primary school believe that I won a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school in Scotland. But no one knows the truth. No one knows that I can't use a computer and that even though as a friend of the "Great Harry Potter" I am in more danger from Voldemort then most other wizards, my greatest fear is that someone will find out that I don't know how to use a computer.  
  
I can make a fire without any matches, I can make things fly. I can summon something from miles away. I can make the most complicated of potions or tell you about goblin revolutions from hundreds of years ago, but I can't use a computer. That might not seem like a big deal to you but to me it is and it makes the two months or so I spend in the muggle world each year a living nightmare, constantly pretending to be something I'm not..  
  
Here comes my sister. I hope she can't tell that I'm struggling with this, that I don't know how to do it.  
  
Don't get me wrong I love being a witch and I wouldn't give it up for anything in a world but sometimes, just sometimes there's a little part of me that thinks back to the day an owl came for a letter for me and changed my life forever, and wishes that it had never arrived, that I was still a muggle.  
  
Sometimes like now. 


End file.
